Whitman & Ginsberg: Sex, Self, & Confessional Poetry

Walt Whitman began in America an exploration of Eastern philosophy and transcendental thought that broke ground for the later acceptance of many ideas that in his time were still taboo: candid portrayal of the human body, homosexuality (though handled vaguely), and the distinctions between the gendered physical self and the conscious soul, separate from the dominant protestant concept. What Whitman began Allen Ginsberg continued; considering Whitman a major influence in ideology and style, Ginsberg opened up the door to confessional poetry, dealing with the same topics (though often more political) with forwardness and honesty, which became the primary approach for modernist poets and continues to be the tradition today. This honesty in poetry, the removal of the distance barrier that had been the norm up until after WWII, is arguably the most important advancing trend in poetry since the Romantics, allowing an intimacy in dealing with subject matter, a realness and directness that was unattainable from an elevated, objective perspective.

Ginsberg played a major role in the expansion and popularity of the Beat Movement, but in American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat by Jonah Raskin, Raskin considers Ginsberg's poetry, collectively, to be a fully-expressed banner for the New Bohemian philosophy that was the Beat Generation. Though Ginsberg became arguably the most influential figure of the Beat poets, his poetry is more than a banner for the movement; it extends beyond the ideas that exemplify the movement. For example, the word "Hippy" is said and the phrase "free love" quickly comes to mind. The word "Beatnik" doesn't invoke Ginsberg's philosophy; in fact, it would be the reverse. It's true his ideas on self found their way to the surface in the Beat Generation, but they were not universally accepted among the Beats, who were all primarily non-conformists, but held varied ideas on many topics. Only later did it find greater popularity with the Hippies, before being snuffed out once again. Raskin's tendency to address Ginsberg's poetry collectively and label it as such is limiting. Ginsberg's works stand alone where Whitman's, though they are coherent alone, don't offer the full range of understanding that can be obtained through treating the poetry as a single entity, like the Bible (an association Whitman would be pleased with).

One of Ginsberg's core principles and a common exploration in his poetry, which is confessional in nature, is the idea of a neuter soul, the purely human self, free from gender; not a homosexual or a heterosexual, just human. Here are two lines from one of his most sexually explicit and confessional poems, Many Loves, which is a recollection of his first sexual encounter with Neal Cassady, a well known womanizer and Beatnik, "His own loins against me soft, nestling in comradeship, put forth & pressed into me, open to my awareness, / slowly began to grow, signal me further and deeper affection, sexual tenderness." (Ginsberg 164) Notice that Ginsberg used the word "comradeship" a word that Whitman was fond of when describing homosexual love, but with Whitman it always heightened the ambiguity, where as in this case, it is completely clear what Ginsberg is describing. It is only fitting then that the epigraph for the poem is a quote from Whitman's In Paths Untrodden: "Resolved to sing no songs henceforth but those of manly attachment" but again it creates ambiguity as "manly attachment," when used by Whitman in the CALAMUS cluster, is the kind of phrasing that aided interpretations of his poetry towards men going out into the forest and hugging and exchanging heterosexual love tokens, as occurred with The Men's Movement. After the uncovering of Whitman's personal journals, there are few left who would consider that the intended meaning, despite its value, so it must be concluded then, that his ambiguity failed his message.

The importance of Ginsberg's approach is the way it relates to sense of self and how the relation of self to poetry changed. He believed in complete honesty, both internal and external, which is the lack of delusion and subterfuge respectively, being in touch with the self-defining truth through being in touch with one's self. The universal/self/truth is another point of commonality with Whitman, who also leaned toward the eastern philosophy and the idea of truth being organic. And though Whitman included obscenity (a word constantly redefined by each generation through the opinions of the majority) in the human form, and sexually explicit imagery loosely related to homosexuality, he wrote under a persona, a created self, the fictional "Walt Whitman;" even his portrait on the cover page of Leaves of Grass is a composite. This is not to say Whitman did not personally consider the idea of self in a similar way; it is only to point out that due to the differences in society and repression of such ideas, that Whitman did not have the freedom to voice in his poetry what would been very controversial topics, which at least contributed to the ambiguous nature of his poetry.

Whitman was concerned with the macrocosm ideas-the universal soul, death, and continuance of oneself through continuance of thought, as expressed in his most popular poem Song of Myself later renamed simply Walt Whitman, a decision that reinforces the argument that he was constantly shaping his public self. David Lehman in his article "The Visionary Walt Whitman" wrote "Certainly Whitman was proud of his public identity and cognizant that it was a created rather than a received thing." (Lehman 11) He also adds that "There is a strong sense in which "Walt Whitman" is the poet's greatest creation, an identity better than a mask s in William Butler Yeats, or a persona as in Ezra Pound, not because it blurs the distinction between self and anti-self but because it implies that there are more distinctions to be made." (Lehman 11) Though this distance became a barrier to Whitman tackling his philosophy at the practical level, it created in his book a lengthy credo or manifesto for his spiritual views and distinctions of self through its whole, rather than each poem specifically. Just as Whitman's poetry works together to create a big picture, it is the grandiose ideas that they tackle, content mirroring style. Ginsberg read Whitman and similarly as Emerson provided rumination for Whitman, Ginsberg was intrigued, but took the concepts as they relate to daily life, the physical body and mind, their connection, and how society creates the restrictions but is itself merely a collection of individuals. It's true that Ginsberg concerned himself with political issues, but it is always focused on the individuals involved to make the statement. In Ginsberg's Howl, part one, he uses a list structure, each line a capture of a real event or at least related to personal experiences of himself and/or his friends:

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

...

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

...

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, (Ginsberg 136, 138)

In an introduction to Howl written by William Carlos Williams, Williams writes this: "It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages." (Ginsberg 819) Where Ginsberg is raw and real, Whitman masks himself in his persona and shifting perspectives through ambiguous pronouns, and even though he describes the body in ways that were pushing the threshold in his time, he uses a sensual romanticism in doing so, often using nature in his sexual metaphors as seen here in lines from Walt Whitman, "A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms; / The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag; / The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides;." In this section of the poem it alternates frequently between lines of nature and human imagery but they are all noun phrases without any referent. And this is an isolated example; virtually every poem from the section titled CALAMUS uses nature metaphor in an exploration of same-sex relationships and the cluster itself is an extended metaphor, like the calamus plant growing in its cluster, relying on the parts to make the whole.

Though Whitman influenced Ginsberg, it is clear that Ginsberg took what he wanted and approached it differently. Whitman's inability to be straightforward in his poetry drew significance away from each line and toward each cluster and the collection as a whole, and though it was a precursor to the modernistic confessional style of Ginsberg, it was more akin to the elevated romantic styles that came before. The ideas of self exploration that began with the Transcendentalists and grew into honesty, and lack of delusion in the Beat generation created confessional poetry, with the emphasis towards efficiency in conveyance of meaning and dealing with the subject matter as directly as possible.

Works Cited

Bradley, Jonathan. "Whitman's CALAMUS." Explicator. 67.4 (2009): 263-267.

Doty, Mark. "Human Seraphim: "Howl," Sex, and Holiness." The American Poetry Review. 35.2 (2006): 6-8.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947-1997. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Lehman, David. "The Visionary Walt Whitman." American Poetry Review. 37.1 (2008): 11-13.

Helms, Alan. Martin, Robert K. ed., "Whitman's 'Live Oak with Moss'." The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992:185-205.

Maslan, Mark. "Whitman, Sexuality, and Poetic Authority." Raritan. 17.4 (1998): 98-119.

Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

The Walt Whitman Archive. Folsom, Ed and Price, Kenneth M. The Center for Digital Research. 1 December 2009 < http://www.whitmanarchive.org/>